Say you want to feel full on a skinflint budget, one as frugal as mine. It’s no easy task. Fortunately, however, with some skill in the kitchen, it is possible — and even delicious.

The Brits call this a variety of names, including the “full breakfast,” the “fry-up,” and the “all-day breakfast.” While the base is fairly simple — a starch, tomatoes, mushrooms, bacon, sausage, eggs, savory puddings, baked beans, and more, all fried on a skillet — it comes alive when properly done.

A Proper Fry-Up, American-Style

1 can baked beans

Half a box breakfast links

2 large eggs

6 baby bella mushrooms

1/2 box grape tomatoes

3 tbsp spicy mustard

3 tbsp honey

3 tbsp pickle juice

1/2 tbsp butter

1 large roll, or 3 slices bread

Salt, pepper, and hot sauce to taste

Simmer the beans in a saucepan over low heat. In large skillet, brown the sausages.

Meanwhile, prepare the tomatoes and mushrooms. Halve the tomatoes, split the mushroom caps from their stems, and quarter the caps.

When the sausages are done, add them to the beans. (They’ll go cold otherwise.) Add the veggies to the skillet, and add the salt, pickle juice, mustard, honey, and other seasonings to them. Toss. Sauté for about 10 minutes, or until the sauce is reduced by half.
Meanwhile, in a small skillet, melt butter. Season and fry the eggs sunny-side up.

To serve, use a deep plate. Plate the tomato-mushroom jawn in the middle; if you elect to pan-fry your bread, do so now. Serve the sausages on one side of the mushroom strip and the eggs right below them; the beans (use about a cup) go on the other side. Place the toast at the top, and serve with (iced) tea.

The sauces from the baked beans and the tomato-mushroom fry intermingle with the egg yolks to create a rich, full-bodied bottom-of-plate sauce that you sop up with your bread — one of the great treats of this dish.

Needless to say, if you have bacon, white or black pudding, oatcakes, Welsh cakes, a hash or hash brown, or any of a plethora of other things available, use it in this recipe. It’s eminently flexible that way.

In this series, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to review a longer show season by season. Let’s see if this works.

It is one of the most loved and most hated of any Star Trek series, focusing on politics, characters, arcs, and worldbuilding rather than the franchise’s traditional “wagon train to the stars” premise. Rather unusually for a 1990s show, and very unusually for its franchise, it developed a complex story arc leading to continuity lockout in later seasons. It arguably influenced Lost, the mid-2000s Battlestar Galatica reboot, and their latter-day descendants (such as The Expanse). It is Deep Space Nine (DS9), the only Star Trek series ever set on a space station rather than a spaceship, a series where they don’t go to their plots; rather, plots come to them. Continue reading Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Season 1→

I believe this is the fourth freewrite I’ve featured? Anyway, back to our friends from Apollas.

Her hydromantic salve was warm against my skin. A very relaxing sort of heat … I stared up at her, towering above me, her features collected and proud in the flickering firelight shadows.

My mind went back to when I first met her, nearly a year ago now. Riz and I had been journeying together for a while then — I had met her in far western Kavaleth, not far from the marcher forts — bouncing from town to town, never really satisfied, never really finding our place in the world.

That day, we had made camp by a glittering little pool in the Forest of Ydds. Rizzeína had gone off trapping, and I was gathering firewood (she was a fair bit better at hunting than me; I preferred fishing). And then, as I dropped the wood by where we had set up a campfire ring, I glanced up and looked at the pond.

A lone female figure stood out in the middle of it, wearing the loose white tunic favored by casters. Her skin was pale, and her hair dark. Her fingertips flicked along the surface, and then as she raised her arms above her head in some yogic pose, the water followed: two mean-looking fins jutting out from either side of her.

She extended her arms straight out, and the fins followed the line of her arm. A couple of swinging motions sent the water far out across the mere, and then, as she slowly turned, she raised a hemisphere around her.

She kept practicing out there, in the middle of the pond. She was beautiful.

“Hello there!” I shouted. “You’re excellent!”

But my words didn’t have the intended effect. For a moment, she froze up, losing control over the water around her. Then, with a rapid wide-draw motion and a flick of her wrist, she drew up several spears of ice out of the tarn. “Who’s there? Who’s been spying on me?”

I strode forward, my hands splayed in a gesture of submission. “Easy, now. I was just gathering wood for my campsite when I saw you in the water.”

“Ha! And why should I believe you?”

I wasn’t in my battle gear, and she had the advantage of distance on me. If she loosed those icicle spears, I would die. I weighed my options. “Come spend the evening with us! My friend’s off looking for food. You look like you could use a little company, is all.”

Her cold sneer echoed off the tarn’s clear water. I didn’t know sneers could do that. “Really now.”

“Look, we’re just strangers in a strange land. And by the looks of it you’re like us — another stranger. We need to band together.” I paused for a moment, hoping the air would clear between us. It didn’t. “Oh, and by the way, my name’s Rolkler. What’s yours?”

“As if you need to know!”

It was at that moment that a fireball flew past my face and slammed into one of her spears, melting it. “You! In the water! That’s my friend you’re threatening!” A hand on my shoulder as she padded forward, lowering herself into a battle post. From Riz, that’s rare.

“Are you really going to be so cavalier towards another’s hospitality?” she continued, kicking up a flame with her foot and wrapping it around her opposite arm, holding it in an open yet fundamentally defensive posture, her intent clear in her body language. “I don’t know what you’re going through, but we oughtn’t fight like this.”

“Hardly! I’m just defending myself. Now, we can stand here trading barbs all day or we can drop things and talk.”

“Or we can fight!” She flung an ice spear at Riz, who almost dreamily swung her arm out, the fire a natural extension, catching it and turning it to steam midair.

“I do not want to fight!”

“I do!” And then she flung all her spears at Riz, rapidly summoning up a half-dome and icing the edges as Riz swooped down and kicked a fireball from her foot to the bunch of incoming spears, and then with an open-palm gesture threw her inner fire into a heat shield. Out in the water, her opponent threw ice points at her, which simply evaporated in the shield, concave and invisible save for subtle lensing. Riz was too skilled to inadvertently cause a forest fire.

Meanwhile, out in the middle of the tarn, her opponent called up a hydrosphere and rolled it around her back into a pair of tentacles extending from her arms, swinging one up, freezing its tip into a wicked supercold knife, the warm late-afternoon spring air fogging around it as she swung it down onto Riz’s heat shield. For a moment, cracks appeared in the air as the shield became translucent — and then it shattered, and immediately behind it was her other water-arm, turned into a grabbing hand, but managing to catch … only air.

In the instant when her shield broke, Riz had cartwheeled back. Now, she threw two quick punches, fireballs flaring from her fists into the maw of her opponent’s grabbing hand, turning it into steam. She kicked up another fireball with her foot and held it in front of her fist in a ready position as her opponent’s left flank was suddenly left bare. “Are you ready to quit? Is that out of your system?”

“Never!”

And with that, she threw her arms out wide, summoning a great circle of water tentacles some three feet out, their chaotic up-and-down and left-and-right movements preventing any openings. Inside the circle, she brought up another attack dome and began firing ice missiles away. Riz lowered her fireball and with a long flattish motion drew it out into a fire wall, catching and steaming her opponent’s ice. Then she stepped towards the wall and punched it dead center, sending it out towards her opponent as, with a circular motion, she drew fire out from the air and sent it into the wall, augmenting it into a larger and larger construct as it crossed into the open water of the tarn.

With a gigantic whish sound, the firewall made contact with her octopus defense and vaporized it, and Riz was immediately there, kicking up three fireballs and punching them towards her waterborne opponent, who had to bring the half-dome down in front of herself and freeze it solid to avoid a direct hit, and even then it sublimated into steam as the third fireball hit it.

Riz then kicked some more fire up, and, running towards the tarn, shaped it into a cylinder. She pulled a spear off of it, and with a flick sent it hurtling towards her opponent, who caught it with a water tentacle, steaming everything. And a second and third and fourth spear — all blocked — as Riz engulfed her body with fire, burning her tunic away, steaming a path into the tarn itself as she hurtled into it, a heat shield projected in front of her flaming body. Even as the water filled in behind her, I could see its level had dropped ever so slightly.

Her opponent touched the pool’s clear surface, and from her touch webbed out ice — she was glaciating the entire tarn to catch her opponent! Riz’s heat shield began to sputter and fizzle, energy leaching out into the harsher and harsher cold surrounding it. Her opponent smiled, jumping on top of the ice, pulling out two blocks of it and pushing them towards Riz as her heat shield gave way against the mighty glacier.

Riz jumped. The ice blocks slammed into each other, their report thunderous. The hydromancer frowned, knowing she had just missed.

And then, out of the sun and drawing its fire down, circling the fire she had gathered around her and creating a lance of it as she landed hard enough to shatter the ice underfoot. Its point grazed her opponent’s chin … but then, so did hers: an ice spear she had conjured up at the very last second.

Adrenaline crackled in their eyes as they stood staring at each other, a dead heat. I stepped out onto the ice, pleasantly cool underfoot in the warm spring weather.

“Ladies, please, you are both exactly as good as each other,” I said, ducking under Riz’s lance and pushing them apart. “Now stop fighting.”

Between their exhaustion and the tone of command in my voice, they drew down — Riz’s fire dissipating, the hydromancer’s ice spear melting. The tarn itself melted, leaving just the ice we were on and a path back to shore. “All right, Rolkler,” she said, “I accede.”

I threw their arms around my shoulder and hauled them both back to shore, the ice path melting back into the tarn once it stopped supporting our weight. From there, we made our way to the fire pit, where they both just slumped out on the ground, dozing right off and leaving me to make the fire. I sighed and got my flint out, sparking it against my armplate, watching the blaze burn bright as it consumed its kindling and caught on the fuel before turning my attention to the pair of rabbits and squirrel that Riz had left on the prep stone before she’d hurried off to help me.

+++

It was much later at night, the animals nearly spit-roasted to perfection, when they finally began to stir. Riz woke first, and she looked at the hydromancer intently as her eyes began to open, holding out her hand and introducing herself.

When it comes to Twilight Princess, simultaneously one of the last major GameCube titles and the Wii launch’s killer app, there are two major schools. On one side, you’ve got people who love Twilight Princess for what it is — a work of art and beautiful storytelling, with strong, engaging characters and incredible development — and, on the other, people who hate it because it’s not “innovative enough”, because it’s “derivative” of Ocarina of Time.

I am an architecture critic. And nothing — NOTHING — grinds my gears quite like that coldly, idiotically dismissive attitude. And you find it ALL THE FUCKING TIME in architectural criticism, to the point where if you don’t praise something that’s “new” and “innovative” and “of its time”, and either flatly ignore or coldly sneer at quality period pieces, the rest of the discipline looks at you weird.

Look at the greatness! Look at it!

That’s how you get such wonderful, innovative, of-its-time pieces like Daniel Libeskind’s Royal Museum of Ontario addition! Isn’t it wonderful? Don’t you love, absolutely love, how it grows out of the original Moorish Revival façade like some kind of crystal cancer? Don’t those jagged, polygonal shapes just make you feel like you’re standing in the presence of some architectural marvel?

Well, guess what, dear reader who thinks Twilight Princess is somehow “bad” because it’s isn’t as innovative as Ocarina? You, good sir, are an idiot. An. Idiot. Let me spell that out for you. I. D. I. O. T. Idiot. Your cousins in the architectural world are the reason why starchitects like Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind, people who specialize in building buildings only architectural critics could possibly love, exist in the first place. Don’t worry, they’re idiots too.

Let’s say, for a minute, that some shredded cheese is all you have in your fridge and you’re not expecting your next paycheck for a few days. Do you have to eat ramen? Not tonight!

The chupaqueso comes from Schlock Mercenary, where it’s portrayed as something that’s both delicious and super-unhealthy. In reality, though, it’s just cooked cheese.

Ingredients

most of one bag of shredded cheese (I prefer Taco and Mexican blends)

a little salsa

Directions

Heat up a nonstick 8′ skillet to a very high temperature. Add about 2/3 of your cheese in a circular shape in the middle of the pan. Allow to cook 3ish minutes: the cheese should be bubbling, and a crust developing where it contacts the bottom of the pan.

Now fluff your remaining cheese over the cracker before it fully hardens, and flip omelet-style. Remove from heat immediately.

Top with salsa if you have it, or a packet of ketchup you nicked from Mickey D’s if you don’t. And that’s it! Serve immediately.